Sunday, September 09, 2012

Abortions for Rape Victims -- Denied

I would never, ever, vote for any candidate whose party included a plank that would make it against the law for rape victims to get an abortion. Today's Republican party proudly stands on a platform that has just such a plank.

By my sense of logic and the decency of things, I can see no daylight whatsoever between that stand and the open support of rape. Yet the Republicans, with that policy dangling so noticeably out of their behinds, are as busy as they can be braying about something as picayune as the Democrats having at first excluded and then included the words "God" and "Jerusalem" in a plank on a different subject in their platform.

The Republicans would say that the life of the fetus trumps everything else by far, and that aborting it would be murder. But what else is rape but a murder of the soul, in this case of the unfortunate woman, and so to deny her the choice of getting rid of the worst result of her ordeal, a completely unwanted pregnancy, would be just to compound the murder of her inner being.

The victim with whom the anti-abortionists profess to be so concerned at this point is still just a tiny uterine growth, with nothing to speak of when it comes to having a brain and a soul. And that conjunction of the rapist's guilt-soaked sperm with the woman's innocent egg is not the only life involved. Besides what is to become of the mother who is forced to work her way through curtains of pain during the birth that are unknown to men, there is also the subsequent life of that rapist's child, and also of the lives of those who, in all the years that follow, are closest to that child. There is the Continuing Horror that could therefore be so easily perpetuated among a large group of people.

Those who who are so happy to adhere to a party that would take such a position obviously have no idea of what an absolutely desolating experience it must be to be raped. They are devoid of all feelings for women who undergo such an extreme trial not only at the time of the experience but also at the time a little later when the victim learns to her intense horror that she is pregnant by the rapist, and also all through the next nine long months when she tries but is strictly prevented from taking any measures to avoid bearing the rapist's "issue," and also all through the period after the child's birth when the mother either puts the child up for adoption or is forced to nurture and to raise the child herself, while trying to persuade herself, most likely without success, that it is all right. And even then the pain of the trauma is still not over or confined to the mother, because it will last all through the life of the child, when eventually she or he learns that he or she is the result of an obscenely criminal sexual attack on their mother that she was forced to endure not only by the rapist but also by the rapist's closest collaborators, the most rabid members of the badly misnamed "pro-life" movement of today. And it will last even more painfully all through the life of the mother, too, because for her that satanic moment of conception can never be put completely behind her, unless she is badly challenged in her mind processes. No, not ever, for all that the callous, indifferent, and congenitally cold-hearted Republicans might wish and seek to decree for her by pushing such an obscene anti-abortion policy.

One can only guess that the Repub voters can push that pro-rape lever at the polling places because not only do they completely lack the imagination to picture what it must be like to be raped, but also they think of rape as something that only happens to those "others," who, like as not, in their eyes deserve it. They are certain it will never happen to any of their loved ones -- unless, of course, the rapist is that voter himself, in which case all will be okay.

This all follows, however, because today's Republicans are the spiritual descendants of the slave-owners of 1860 who pushed the country into a long, ruinous Civil War in an enraged attempt to preserve what they saw as their rights and "ownership" over a subject people that they had the absolute power to oppress whenever the notion struck them, and in any of the myriad forms that humans can conceive to despoil other human beings, and raping slave women at will was a privilege of which the slaveholders availed themselves quite often.

Therefore it can be no surprise that those who look so fondly back on those bad old days and are trying to move Heaven and Earth to return the country as close as possible to that former state when rape in more than one form was one of their predecessors' most precious prerogatives, are dreaming of creating such a position for themselves, which is always that of the rapist and never of the raped, and therefore they would not have the slightest feeling for any woman -- or man, for that matter -- who has been so egregiously and horribly violated. Thus such a plank in their political platform -- and such a yawning gap in their moral makeup.

No doubt with a stand like this, Republicans poll heavily among rapists, because this plank gives them the message that not only is rape okay but also that in subsequent years they will be free to sneak proud peeks at their progeny from afar while not having had to endure any of the worry and expense of raising that child.

And we haven't even gotten to the idiot senatorial candidate in Missouri who this year tried to suggest that women don't get pregnant from rape anyway, by some internal means that automatically "shuts the door."

The accepted figure for the number of rapes that result in pregnancy nationally is 5 percent, and I am told that this works out to 34,000 a year, so that door must not work too well. To some that 34.000 may seem to be a small number, but neither of the two cities nearest here in Virginia is that much larger.

2 Comments:

Lovely and well written. I only have one issue with what you said. " but also that in subsequent years they will be free to sneak proud peeks at their progeny from afar while not having had to endure any of the worry and expense of raising that child." This portion is (sadly - in many states) untrue. They don't peek from far away, they sue for shared, joint, or even full custody. So the rape continues....